Alex's Top 5 Favorite Art Surprises in El Prado
Madrid's El Prado is one of them big monster museums that can eat up your entire trip to a great European city. Go inside any such place and your entire 4 day stop in Florence, St. Petersburg, Paris or Rome could vanish in a blink, simply because it took that much time to fully admire the contents of the Uffizi, the State Hermitage Museum, the Louvre or the Vatican Galleries. The scale of El Prado, Madrid's own Uffizi/Hermitage/Louvre/Vatican, is foretold in any tourist guide book listing the principal celebrity art works that reside there (Velazquez's Las Meninas, El Greco's Pentecost, Goya's Maja Desnuda and Tres de Mayo, Pieter Breughel the Elder's Triumph of Death and Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights cap off the shortlist version).
In honor of El Prado, I decided to post about my five favorite surprise art encounters there; paintings I hadn't been looking for or (in all but one case) even knew of the existence of prior to visiting, but which stopped me in my tracks, held my attention and tickled my fancy senseless in unexpected ways.... as two days of strolling the halls and recircling back to them will attest.
#1 Lucas Cranach the Elder:
A Hunt at the Castle of Hartenfels In Honor of the Emperor Charles V (1545)
(click the image for a larger, fuller version)
Never have I seen the human capacity for cruelty to animals captured on such a massive and lovingly rendered scale as in Cranach's bloodthirsty paean to mammalian slaughter in the name of sport. The huntsmen of Johann Frederick, Elector of Saxony, prepare a stag hunt to flatter the masculinity of the blunt-jawed Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (who dorkily stands at the bottom left, seemingly at a loss). With hounds and horns, they drive what appears to be the entire stag population of the northern Teutonic forests into a little river before Schloss Hartenfels, where the animal holocaust begins. Arrows down the desperate stags (whose expressions of panic and terror are vividly well rendered) as they foam at the mouth, or at least the ones who manage to avoid drowning in the river (not all of them do, naturally). In the background, the unlucky stragglers are torn apart by dogs. The hounds take their pick, some preferring to go for leg, others for ass and still others for the pleasing shower that only a good bite to the internal jugular or carotid can provide. The stags, naturally, don't take this lying down, furiously driving their antlers straight into the broken bodies of some very unfortunate and very impaled dogs (whose expressions of suffering as they exsanguinate and expire are just as sympathetically rendered as the final convulsions of the stags). The hounds' companions immediately rally to revenge their fallen litter mates, taking a chunk of deer biceps femoris or latissimus dorsi to satisfy their rage. The body haul from the massacre is collected by some men in canoes, exeunt stage left. One must hope the buffet lines were really excellent that night, because it would be a pity to have sacrificed what seems to be the entire stag population of northern Germany for just a few hours' thrill.
Don't expect the gentle touch of a woman to save any of these hapless victims either; even the Great Elector's wife Sybille gleefully joins the carnage and takes up her position at the left side of the canvas with an armed coterie of her ladies in waiting, eager to contribute their share of the victims. You might have thought that a girl in a spunky pink Baroque dress covered by a suit of armor wouldn't be able to handle a crossbow very well, but you'll change your mind when you see the sexy swagger with which the Electress demurely hefts her massive weapon with a killer's steady hands and takes aim, her face a mask of utter conviction that tells you that when this femme fatale fires, she will unfailingly add to the already staggering body count.
(Sidenote: I was surprised to see this one again because I had seen it a year earlier when it was being loaned to the Galleria Borghese in Rome for an exhibition on Cranach's hunting paintings.... I'd forgotten that it had actually come from El Prado. It was just as delightfully and furiously violent as I remembered.)
#2 Emilio Sala y Francés:
The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1889)
I love learning new details of history during trips, especially where they concern the lives of empowered female monarchs, a special subject of fascination for me. Throughout central Castile, I was puzzled by the presence of the motto "Tanto Monta" that was inscribed on several monuments associated with Isabel la Catolica, Queen of Castile (of Isabelle/Ferdinand/Columbus fame). By its ubiquity in royal locations, I took this to be some kind of regal motto, but its meaning was not immediately apparent to me. What could it be? "So much is he/she worth"? "So much value it has"? When I saw "Tanto Monta" written again in this lovely painting (an Exposición Nacional honorable mention from 1889), in the cupola above the thrones of Isabel and Fernando, my curiosity finally prompted me to look it up. Spanish Wikipedia enlightened me that it was in fact an abbreviation: the motto in full was "Tanto Monta, Monta Tanto, Isabel como Fernando" (as much as he is worth, so much she is worth, Isabel as much as Ferdinand).
The story behind it is as such: apparently, when Isabel married Ferdinand, she sagely had him sign a prenuptial agreement by which it was recognized that the two monarchs would be equal partners in the sovereignty over their joint kingdom. Before marriage, Ferdinand was destined to be King of Aragon, but Isabel was the sovereign Queen of Castile in her own right, and she had no intention of giving up her kingdom to become the silent wife and consort of a man who might see the marriage as a convenient way to rule over Castile via domination of the little wife. Not only was the prenuptial agreement signed, but to remind everyone that the husband and wife were to be respected as equal partners in the sovereign authority, the motto "Tanto Monta" was devised and inscribed over every place where royal audience might be granted, to remind all who sought their attention that they were addressing two equally powerful monarchs, rather than a king and his obedient spouse.
The painting itself depicts the moment in which Cardinal Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, angrily throws down his cross before the Catholic Monarchs and warns them not to accept the gift of a wealthy Jew, who is trying to derail their plan to expel all Jews from their kingdom with the offer of a generous donative. Supposedly, Torquemada said that to acquiesce in permitting the Jews to stay would have been akin to Judas Iscariot selling Christ for 30 gold pieces. Isabel and Fernando were apparently impressed by this display of Iberian fanaticism, and held to their resolution to give the Hebrews the boot. They would probably have done better to sell the body of Christ a second time. As history confirms, the sheepherding medieval Castilians were ill prepared to handle the money management issues that came with the influx of Mexican and Peruvian gold over the next two generations. Without the Jewish middle class to lend some financial savvy in their spoiled grandkids' bankrupt dominions, another nail was hammered into the coffin for Spain's era of world dominance - an era that Isabel had worked so diligently to create in the first place.
#3 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio):
Offering to Venus (1518)
This far too adorable painting is cuteness overkill, late Italian Renaissance style. In La Ofrenda a Venere, an innumerable swarm of cupids gather before a statue of Venus, bearing offerings of fruit with which to honor the Goddess of Love. However, they get completely distracted by all the things that you'd expect human babies to be derailed by, namely sneak-eating the fruit from the baskets themselves, kissing and hugging each other, pointing their tiny bows and arrows at their kindergarten pals in playful menace, falling on their asses, climbing into the baskets, using the offerings as catch the ball toys, and generally being completely adorable while forgetting all about the solemn honors of their Olympian mother. Yes, I did also mention the babies totally making out in honor of Venus. On the other hand, their two babysitters on the right manage to preserve their sense of awe for the religious gravity of the occasion, using what must be a divine level of focus to tear themselves away from the ocean of cuteness before them and to adore the voluptuous statue of Venus instead. When have we ever seen the little winged divinities depicted as such, well, babies?
#4 Francisco Pradilla:
Doña Juana la Loca, Reina de Castilla (1877)
An arresting and sympathetic depiction of Joanna the Mad, Queen of Castile, the daughter of Isabel and Fernando, standing beside the coffin of her prematurely dead hottie of a husband, Felipe el Hermoso (Phillip the Handsome of the House of Habsburg). Queen Juana is completely lost in her loco world of grief-stricken dementia, staring in vacant devastation at the little box draped with the double-headed eagle seal of the Habsburg dynasty, wherein lie the remains of her spouse. Who knows what's going through her head at that moment? In her confusion, she seems oblivious to the cold weather that hounds the funeral procession from Burgos to Granada. Her exhausted ladies in waiting are falling asleep by the roadside and keenly feeling the bitterness of the march in the dead of winter across the Iberian plains, while winds whip the funerary candles and the smoke from the furnace that provides a feeble protection to the beleaguered retainers.
In the same room at El Prado, you can also appreciate another painting by Lorenzo Valles, depicting Juana ordering the exhumation of the body of her dead husband in the fanciful expectation that he will come back to life and rejoin her. From these two paintings, you might get the impression that Queen Juana was deeply in love with Felipe and sad to see him go.... but alas, both paintings are painted under a substantial cloud of romantic historical revisionism. In real life, Juana was apparently an intelligent woman (she spoke all four Ibero-Romance dialects after all - Castilian, Leonese, Catalan and Portuguese/Galician, in addition to French and Latin) like her mother, but much more vulnerable to being bullied by pig-headed male tyranny than Isabel was (see above). Her "madness" was most likely major depression with psychotic features, perhaps brought on by a life of unsuccessfully trying to fend off her husband's and father's constant attempts to usurp the kingdom that she had inherited from dear old mom. Eventually, her own son, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, imprisoned her in a monastery in northern Spain, where she died many decades later in her ripe eighties.
#5 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo:
Queen Zenobia before the Throne of Aurelian (early 18th century)
I have always favored empowered females, and particularly those female sovereigns throughout history who have sustained the crown and scepter with glory. And so it is with some chagrin that I admit to having been captivated by this relatively obscure Tiepolo, which depicts an episode that I recall from my favorite original-English-language book of all time, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. In the third century AD, Zenobia, the tyrantess of the kingdom of Palmyra, boldly declared the independence of Syria and defied the Roman emperor Aurelian, who threatened to reduce her Asiatic fiefdom back into a province of Rome during his tireless crusade to reunite the disintegrating empire. As Gibbon records, Zenobia proved to be a formidable foe, defying the innate weakness of her sex to raise and lead three armies into hotly contested engagements with the militant emperor, all three of which ended in defeat for Zenobia. Undaunted, she retreated back into her capital city "and resolved with the courage of a heroine that the last instant of her life and of her reign would be the same". Alas, as Gibbon reminds us, the courage of women is superficial and shortlived, being contrary to their soft feminine natures. Sure enough, as soon as Palmyra falls and Zenobia is brought before the throne of Aurelian as a prisoner, she disgraces herself by begging for the clemency of the emperor, protesting her innocence and loudly accusing her advisors of having counseled her to perfidy and rebellion.
The broken spirit of independent-minded feminine strength and the proper resumption of womanly submission and meekness at the hour masculine victory is the centerpiece of this canvas, which grandly memorializes the manly triumph of Aurelian and the restoration of the male dominated order. Zenobia's capitulation is a reminder to all you women that even when you chicks try to act all strong and stuff, we men know it's only a front that will evaporate at the first sign of trouble, and that that whole "being strong" business is really for us men.
--Alex Lee